I recently (well January, to be accurate) bought a cheapish Toshiba Satellite C660-2EL, which works fine with Xubuntu 12.04. There have been some dodgy periods where the wifi hasn't worked very well, but it's settled down now and seems fine.
In general, going for anything with Intel hardware gives pretty good support (indeed, I would probably have had less trouble with wifi if it had an Intel wireless card on board).

My main laptop is a Lenovo X220 and I have been running Ubuntu (11.04, 11.10 and 12.04) on it for the past 10 months or so. I have also played around with CrunchBang and Arch; both also seem fine on this particular hardware.

I would definitely consider another Lenovo when the time comes for a personal hardware refresh.

Ubuntu has a certified hardware page, with some of the most recent Lenovo and Dell laptops identified, if you're interested:

mediamgl wrote:My main laptop is a Lenovo X220 and I have been running Ubuntu (11.04, 11.10 and 12.04) on it for the past 10 months or so. I have also played around with CrunchBang and Arch; both also seem fine on this particular hardware.

I would definitely consider another Lenovo when the time comes for a personal hardware refresh.

Ubuntu has a certified hardware page, with some of the most recent Lenovo and Dell laptops identified, if you're interested:

If you're looking for a laptop with no Wintax(TM), then I can heartily recommend Novatech http://www.novatech.co.uk. I've had three laptops from there, for myself and family, and have had almost no problems with them (I've had a slight issue with one touchpad not being a synaptics one, but sentelic, and the driver had a few bugs) - I also run Fedora exclusively.

Best of all, they're based in the UK and have a few stores dotted around the UK as well as the usual internet shop.

If I were to say anything bad about them, the laptop housings on some of their own-branded machines feels a little cheap and flimsy, but I fortunately haven't dropped one yet to find out if this is actually the case.

(You can also play on the website and see how much they add on to the prices for Windoze - for example, one PC at £290 with no OS is as much as £690 with Win7 ultimate + office2010!)

einonm wrote:If you're looking for a laptop with no Wintax(TM), then I can heartily recommend Novatech http://www.novatech.co.uk. I've had three laptops from there, for myself and family, and have had almost no problems with them (I've had a slight issue with one touchpad not being a synaptics one, but sentelic, and the driver had a few bugs) - I also run Fedora exclusively.

Best of all, they're based in the UK and have a few stores dotted around the UK as well as the usual internet shop.

If I were to say anything bad about them, the laptop housings on some of their own-branded machines feels a little cheap and flimsy, but I fortunately haven't dropped one yet to find out if this is actually the case.

(You can also play on the website and see how much they add on to the prices for Windoze - for example, one PC at £290 with no OS is as much as £690 with Win7 ultimate + office2010!)

Office 2010 is the culprit there. The more full-featured versions are extortionate unless you have a need for their features (most people will get by OK with Word/Excel/Powerpoint)...

...

I've had two Acer laptops, neither of which have played very well with linux. Dell has had a better track record for me (Studio 17) where (and I pause before saying this) "it just works" with both a RedHat based distro (Scientific Linux) and a Debian distro (Ubuntu) all hardware works, wifi behaves itself, Bluetooth, etc...